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Welcome to the Island Rambles Blog

Welcome to my blog world. This is a photo blog, poetry and short story blog about my life on Vancouver Island, B.C. Canada. I take photos of the birds and scenery I find. I hope you enjoy your time here and please come back again. PHOTOS WILL ENLARGE IF CLICKED. The photos are slide show enabled if you click on them. If you click on the top lighthouse photo it always takes you to the most recent summary list of my postings.

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Sunday, December 02, 2012

Useful Blog Tips

This blog is posted for the letter “u” on ABC Wednesday so be prepared for masses of “u” words. I thought it might be useful for others to read. I am mixing in some random photos as well as it is really boring and it is a bit of a mess as I am in a rush. I have to pop in a few birds and photos for my favorite memes which are listed at the end. ( Some of the pictures are upside down on purpose for the letter "u".)

(These pictures were taken at Ucluelet, B.C.)

Some Useful Information on Blogging, it is up to you to decide if it is useful. Most of this info is for Blogger blogs but some applies to other hosts as well.

(Upside down picture of Ucluelet, B.C.)

(Upside down swans on purpose.)What do you do if you cannot get into your blog at Blogger and your Google Account is frozen.There are many blogging tips but these are the critical ones that every blogger must know about.How to save your blog and how to recover your blog. And I will pop in a few of my own ideas on blogging as well.

little chickens under the heat lamp

Upside down heron on purpose.

This is for the letter "u" at ABC meme so I will be using many "u" words, I have not gone nutty yet. I hope!!! This goes under the heading of Blogging tips. I am not sure how much more blogging I will do so I want to share some little helpful tips about blogging at Blogger, and Google. I am not sure that I will continue on blogging and I want to be helpful to those bloggers who visited me so often.This is not my usual blog style, this is a photoblog normally. I am not a really great blogger and I am not a great writer so this is just basic beginner stuff that almost all bloggers know already. I am not of the younger computer generation so this is all I have picked up on my own. And it applies mostly to those at Blogger.

I spend a lot of time under owls nests.

Totems under the lights at the museum.

I like being under baby eagles when they fly.

Under the ocean

Looking way way up at the sky.

MY 'U' WORDS, I am trying to use up as many “u” words as I can and still have this blog understandable.What if you are ever unable to get into your Blogger blog what do you do.This is unacceptable, unfair and uncommon and unfortunate but occasionally it will occur as Google bots search through the blogs looking for unscrupulous bloggers and in error your blog, Google account may be made unavailable, locked, frozen. This includes your Blog and Picasa account as well.If you are unfamiliar with this procedure you may become unhinged like I did.In order to be undisturbed and unaffected by this unpleasant unexpected event here are some tips for bloggers so you can understand, uncover and undo it. This will unravel the unwritten, unspoken, unexplained, unconditional, unfounded, unalterable event.How many "u" words so far. Pretty good hey. I think I will add an "insert jump break" here and you will have to click read more to see the rest as this is a long post. Click READ MORE BELOW TO SEE THE REST.

Upside down Ducks, I like it!

No one knows who this duck is above.

Wood Duck under branches.

SAVE YOUR BLOG POSTS AND TEMPLATE

It is unwise and unguarded not to have saved your blog pages, posts and your template. Undertake the task of saving to a computer or hard drive your template from your blog and download your blog posts as well.How to do this. On your dashboard you will see the Template section and on the top of that you can save it, export it to your harddrive.You can save your Picasa account in a zipfile from your Google account under products and data liberation. Download your Data at the bottom of the page.You can save, or export your entire blog from settings, other and then, BlogTools at the top of the page..export .Do this whenever you want to do it to update it. Just keep saving it. Did you know you have a blog dashboard but you have a Google Dashboard also with many features there and all your products are there. Lots of exciting things to learn at the Webmaster Tools, where you can pull a post off of the net if you really mess it up. This is called Fetch and it is in Diagnostics, so if you need to pull off a post already crawled by the googlebot, go there. In Dashboard you can find your Google Friends, Feeds, Who Subscribes and stats and who links. In Webmaster Tools you can make a sitemap. It is easy. I continue to use .com not the country redirect on a lot of my links that I put in places as really all of us are .com as the country redirect shows different in each country.

Under the trees at Sombrio Beach and below is
upside down French Beach!!!

You can also send your blog posts to yourself by email and save them on your email account and pop onto a harddrive.You can also set up a backup blog on a different blogger account. You know you can export your entire blog to it for saving, keep private and unpublished. Don’t publish a second exact blog as this would be a spam thing to do.Or you can use one of the free blog backer-upper web sites.I have used BlogBackupr. If you want you can set up another blog, export your blogger blog to it at another host like WordPress as well or have some other account so you can at least get on the net. You can export your entire blog to WordPress or one of the others and just save it until you need it one day. You need another account at Blogger and Google if yours is locked and you try to get help. Most of these methods will not save your comments which is soooooo sad. You can back up your comments from your feeds if you subscribe to them. The exporting of the entire blogger blog will have comments on it if you want to export it to another bogger blog.It is very easy and works well. On Firefox you can use the DownThemAll extension and you can get all your posts from the search http:/your blog full name with blogspot /search?max-results=1000. You can use HTTrack Webside Copier also or Backupify. You can't move your gadgets to another host, hard to move XML gadgets and they will be static. The Blog Address of your former blog cannot be moved to a new one. Don't auto publish all your old posts on a new blog, easier to do each individually. Remember Googlebots only like to see one post not crawl another duplicate.

Upside down reflection at Brentwood.

RECOVER YOUR BLOG

If you have been locked out by Google while they umpire and recheck your blog to see if you are spam...you will get little note asking if you are the owner of this blog and that they think it is spam and you can go to the blogger help group to try to get your blog back, try “something is broken section”. Then you will get a link to put your blog in for reassessment.Do this right away, there seems to be a time limit now.It takes a while. All done by robots.Do not put more than one post into the Help group, it is not really a forum to help other people I found out....you just can put one post in and keep updating it until someone will notice it or not. They seem to be volunteers there. Oh your entire Google account all other blogs on that account and Picasa albums will be locked so you will have to open or have another google account to get on the help group forum page.Cool hey. See links below to do the whole thing.

(I am so sorry I really like these upside down photos, and
they have taken over here, Butchart Gardens above and
below Sooke Watershed both upside down!)

GOOGLE HELP GROUPS

You have to be really polite as the volunteer moderators have to deal with a lot of unpleasant things.Sometimes there are no volunteer moderators or they will not reply. You are considered spam if you put in a lot of posts, post in all sections, reply when you should not reply to others and stuff like that or if you say bad words or yell like this YELLING BAD.You can also go to google help and find the section on how to reclaim your blog. They erased all the old help group recently, the entire thing and all the old links and started a new Google Help one now....so none of the old links work anymore, that is not helpful to me. I lost all my helpful links to put in here.Basically if your account is locked these are the steps:l. make sure you are not a violation of the TOS.2. do the contact form3. submit the appeal 4. submit the date and time at the Google Help, Something is Broken and say your blog has falsely been classified as spam, please reinstate and be brief and very very polite. I have written out the info in detail below.

In most cases you will be automatically directed to this page by Google:

You can contact Blogger here on this form. You can go to the Google Help Groups...you will get there from the contact form page above or click here and you will be at the Account access and safety for Google+ email accounts or go to the Something is Broken help page if you use another email account.
This is the note you will get when you contact Google:
"Please summarize what happened when your account became disabled so we can investigate. We'll follow up with you only if we require more information or we have additional information to share".
You must give them a real current email address so they can contact you back and they need your sign-in email on the account..do not try to be anonymous on the private contact form. On the public help forum you only have to put in your blog name and link NOT your email or any personal stuff, etc. Never give out your email on the public help forum and never give out your email and your blog name sign-in anywhere. Fill out the form for contact and submit it. Then you wait for some time, perhaps there is a limit now. Some only wait for 12 hours. I had to dig up some extra help to get my blog back.

If your blog name and posts are taken here are some steps at Chuck's Site, The Real Bogger Status. He is also nitecruzr on blogger help and has other sites.

General stuff about blogging:

You can keep your blog nice and clean by making sure that you do not link to any spammers...bots will check outgoing links sometimes so if you get a comment with a link in it, it may not be a good link.When you check your blog stats don't randomly click into some link there either...this encourages the bad guys. Know who you are linking to, know who you are following and who follows you.Keep your blog nice.If you are curious about a link in your stats just Google and read about it on Google and check it before you actually go to it. Check out who you followers are. Know who is commenting. Know what links you are putting in.

Please don't use capchas, people who have a lot of trouble seeing like me cannot see the capchas, or word verification letters and numbers...please use comment moderation instead, this removes all the spam from your account totally. You do not want to get all that spam on your account do you.So use comment moderation. You never get spam then and remove the ability for anonymous comments as they are the spammers usually.

Browsers:

Remember clear your cache and history also....keep some cookies that you want to keep so your browser runs. I always save my browser favorites, pictures, docs etc. on my harddrive as well. Check what add-ons are running on your browser too.Then you just have to realize that with blogging, the Internet and computers, as with all things, it will break at times. I am not an experienced google, blogger or computer person.

This is enough to unearth from the vaults for today.I am not ungrateful to Google I am very grateful to have this platform to share my work. However it is good to know how it all works.I hope this helps anyone that wants to know about this stuff and you can save a link to it.Here is my disclaimer:I am not a Google expert , please go to their Help Group for the full info this is just a little bit about what I have discovered myself as a blogger, as things change so rapidly at Blogger, owned by Google, this will probably be outdated as Google moves along making the changes over at Blogger. I guess the reason I did this post information is because my account was frozen for a week when I went to Google help to try to get help to get my google friends gadget to work, I posted on more than one section unknowingly and was classified as spam. My google friends gadget works but I had to make it into a badge now that you just click on. Be careful third-party gadgets, and don't accept fun gadgets to put on your blog from some unknown party like the facebook color gadget. If you found this post helpful, please let me know and leave a note.

(I went a little insane doing this post, so that is why I thought upside down photos were great!).Bookmark this post in case you need it for future reference.

Thank you to these memes for allowing bloggers to share their story. I may not remember to enter them all but this is the quick way for me to join in the memes as I have some difficulty with my eyes.

I will put the corrections in a comment below as I do not like to correct and then republish.

edit note: I sometimes have to republish after I see how many errors I made or links not working. I list all the memes for the week now as I can only spend a short time on the computer as my eyes get tired. Such is life. To continue reading posts you must click older post below or see the index at the top or the side or pick a popular post or label from the sidebar.

Hi Crafty Gardener, the read more works from the main page only. It was a long time ago that I got my account frozen. But it was on a holiday, like last Christmas or something and no one was working at Google so was a nightmare.

Wow, amazing post. The reflection photos are awesome, loved them all. I am also amazed at all the information you have included in your post. I back up my computer and photos but I have never backed up the blog. I guess I should start thinking about doing it now. Thanks for this post, have a great day!

These are wonderful shots and great information. I was just getting ready to look for an upside down shot in my photo archives for ABC Wednesday so great minds think alike. You have some fantastic ones.

OMG, that is a handful. The inverted photos are great, but there's a lot here, haha! And your instructions for emergency look wonderful. It happened to me once also, and i posted after that as "i had a heart attack" so many readers alerted on cue back-upped theirs. However, since then i haven't done backup again, and i added one more blogsite. I actually forgot what i did the last time as it was by trial and error.

Those you gave us here are so plenty, i may not be able to comprehend, computer instructions are alien to me, most of the time i can't follow them. Now with the so many options you gave, i don't also know which to choose, hahaha! Sorry about that, but I am really not so strong with computer language. I guess i should mark this for future reference. Thanks.

UPDATE TO THE ABOVE INFO: I knew it, Google Blogger came up with a new additional info to the above methods as soon as I POSTED!! Anyway we will have an addition on our Dashboards, at Blogger, where if your blog only, not account, is locked it will say so right under the NEW BLOG sign on the dash. It will list your deleted blogs. You get the option to Undelete and if that does not work then go through the above process as usual. But if your account is locked you do not get into your account so proceed as above. Chuck has some good info on it at The Real Blogger Status but don't like to link in here.

Cool shots! Good info the lock out. This happened to me last year around the holidays and it took them 3 weeks to get my blog back on line. I was so pissed that I dumped blogger and moved to Wordpress. After going to the help forums and reading how rampant it was and the thousands of people it happens to on a daily basis, I gave up.

A great take on the theme; thank goodness for gravity:-) Thanks for taking the time with the blog tips. It also explains when I have revisted blogs and got a deleted message. Bad blogger.BTW my record for trying to enter a capcha is 5 attempts, groan. Joy - ABC Team

Hi! Thanks so much for visiting my blog on Vancouver Island Nature and Birds. I love to take photos of places we go to on Vancouver Island and the birds and animals we see. I love also to get comments so please leave a note for me. Cheers and thanks again. NoraComment moderation is on so the comment does not publish right away. I do not have Google+ sorry cannot comment on some of those sites. PLEASE DO NOT PUT A LINK IN THE COMMENT ANYMORE. I AM SORRY BUT THAT IS THE WAY IT IS NOW.